No Follow Links Explained for Sponsored Posts

Looking to understand more about no follow links? Then you’ve come to the right place. As part of the sponsored post campaigns from The SITS Girls, all bloggers should be utilizing no follow links whenever linking to a brand’s page in exchange for compensation.

No Follow Links Explained

What is a no follow link?

It really is a straight forward concept. “Nofollow” provides a way for bloggers to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

How does Google handle no follow links?

In general, Google does not follow them. This means that they do not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links.

What does the HTML look like?

When you look at the text or HTML tab on your website, here is what a no follow link should look like:

<a href=”http://www.abccompany.com/” rel=”nofollow”>ABC Company</a>

Warning! Do not copy this code directly from this page onto your blog. Sometimes, when you copy HTML from a webpage, the code does not transfer perfectly. This could lead to double quotation marks, maybe leaving out the word, follow, and/or your quotation marks show up as italicized. Ultimately, this problem can be corrected by re-typing (and not copying and pasting) the link code onto the HTML tab in your blog post.

What are Google’s policies and some specific examples of no follow usage?

Here are two cases in which you want to be sure you are using no follow links:

Untrusted content:
If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should no follow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web.

Paid links:
A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, Google urges bloggers to use no follow on such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word “Advertisement”).

No Follow Links Video Tutorial

Watch this video tutorial to get all the info you need in under 2 minutes! Not only do we address the how’s and why’s of no follow links, but we also show you how to construct one using HTML.